The Highest Frontier (6 page)

“Jenny,”
texted Rafael.
“Have you seen Mary Dyer?”

“Sorry, no.”
Perhaps Mary, too, got off a waitlist.

The students stood around trailing their shoelaces, some looking dazed, as if they’d stumbled into someone else’s toyworld. Others chatted up their neighbors. Ricky and Reesie pointed this way and that as if they owned the place.

“Did your high school have a Young International Leaders Program?”

“Where’d you get waitlisted?”

“Swarthmore and Amherst. What about you?”

“Forget Amherst—they took a DIRG by mistake.”

“Hey, all our family DIRGs went to Berkeley.”

“Through Toynet, you mean. Amherst actually accepted one residential. They tried to send it home but—”

“My AP calculus teacher was a DIRG at MIT.”

Jenny cleared her box and zoomed to center stage. The stage was decked with purple coneflowers and Indiangrass. A handsome arrangement, the pots well watered and artfully placed. Two teddies fussed busily about the podium, some last-minute glitch, while below the stage a maintenance worker in power bands pounded a stuck block of amyloid.

Dean Kwon again. “All frogs please line up promptly behind the professors.”

Rafael pointed. “Frogs line up here. Jenny, you can pair with Anouk Chouiref.”

Anouk was a dark
parisienne
with a high-bridged nose, her nose ring sporting a ruby. A floral headscarf artfully hid her hair; tight black skirt to her ankles, her feet turned out in ballet flats. With a smile, she made a
plié
. Her cheeks shone with sienna skinglow, the most expensive kind.
“Anouk Chouiref, daughter of the Euro finance minister.”
A clip of herself in her white veil and tulle, dancing
Giselle
. She leaned confidentially to Jenny’s ear.
“Somers, chez l’éléphant. Enchantée.”
She caught Jenny’s hand. “Of course … my condolences.”

“Thanks,” Jenny whispered dutifully.

Anouk texted,
“We’ll share the same Life class.”

How did Anouk know that, Jenny wondered. She had sent Professor Abaynesh a course list, but had posted nothing in her toybox window. Jenny made herself swallow, like the mental always said. She looked at her own shoes, laces tied like a dwork. She texted,
“I raise orchids. Do you like chemistry?”

“Especially orbital theory. We’ll be lab partners; I’ll do all the calculations,”
Anouk offered loftily. Her window flashed,
“Visit my Lims in Series World.”

“Thanks.”
Jenny eyed Anouk with interest, her scarf the height of
haute couture.
“Is your brother here?”

Anouk’s face slipped, just for a moment. The wrong thing to ask, Jenny reproached herself. But the
parisienne
recovered, with a delicate shrug. “
Enfin
 … he had other plans. Oxford.” She squeezed Jenny’s hand and whispered. “We’re going to be great friends.”

Jenny blinked Anouk’s window to confirm this new member of her ten thousand playmates. It would be a change having a “sister,” and one so sharp. Jenny had always done Jordi’s math for him.

In her toybox, the two teddies behind the coneflowers bumped fists, then scampered offstage. Lining up in two columns, the students climbed the Mound toward the stage.
“Watch your step,”
texted Dean Kwon as they approached the risers surrounding the powwow ground.
“Remember, you feel lighter as you rise.”
The pairs parted, and the students filed up singly. At her seat, Jenny turned in time to see the Shawnee elders with their great fans of feathers lead the line in. Across her box scrolled,
“No animals were harmed for this ceremony.”

Elders carried the American flag, the Ohio state flag, then the eagle staff with its proudly hooked beak.
“Veterans of the Antarctic Farmland Defense.”
Black and white feathers fanned out from their backs, swaying in the breeze. They planted their flags at the stage amid the coneflowers.

After the elders came the first black-robed professor.
“Dean of the Faculty, Helen Tejedor.”
Jenny looked forward to Tejedor’s frog seminar on “Postvirtual Cuba.” A tall woman with long auburn hair, Tejedor carried a colonial ax, a round blade big enough for Paul Bunyan.

Whistles and toychat from the owls.

“¡Diosa!”

“¡Hasta la victoria siempre!”

“
¡Viva Guantánamo!”
The famous return of the naval base, when Cuba had joined the States. Or, Cuba
venció los Estados,
as Jenny’s grandfather insisted.

After Tejedor’s ax followed two columns of professors, all in black robes like bats hanging in the attic.

A brilliant ball of light drew attention to the podium. There stood a priest in the embroidered vestments of First Church Reconciled, the Roman-Anglican church.
“Chaplain Clarence Flynn.”
Father Clare was Uncle Dylan’s spouse, a longtime visitor at Soledad’s fundraisers. Here on stage behind the Indiangrass, he looked more like a prairie preacher.

The drums stilled. Jenny’s ears still rang. From the naked trees she heard a chorus of chirping. The peeper frogs.

“The chaplain—he’s the man. You get in trouble, go see him.”

“He runs Homefair—we build homes in Mount Gilead.”

“He teaches Renaissance Art—get done your art requirement. What are you taking?”

“English Poets.”

“English, that’s so middle school.”
Frontera had no English department.

“
Nueva Cuba
. Tejedor’s hot.”

“Political Ideas, with Phil Hamilton. Super hot—don’t miss him.”

“God the Father and Mother,” intoned Father Clare. “We humans call upon You to bless the undertakings of all of us here in orbit around our precious Earth; our Shawnee hosts, our neighbors in Mount Gilead, and especially our new students and their parents. For we, along with all of our unknown fellow creatures of distant stars whom we may yet encounter, all of us, however great or low, are creatures of time. We begin at our beginning, and place ourselves in Your loving care unto the end. You alone, the Unknowable Creator, protect us in our endeavors and aspirations, and grant us peace in our universe. Amen.”

Above the stage, about halfway up to Mount Gilead, hung a bright patch of purple. The purple square began to float down. Students gasped and pointed as the square expanded, a luminous parachute, striped purple and white. At first it seemed to float forever, then it descended rapidly as the centrifugal pull grew, its silken billows stretched above lines of anthrax. At last the silk collapsed, depositing a man upon the stage. As purple-shirted owls rushed to carry the folds of silk offstage, out stepped a tall man in a lunar Formula One racing suit. The Frontera College president.

“Students, parents, Shawnee elders, friends.” Receiving a black academic gown from the chaplain, President Chase draped it over his racing suit. Chase had a nut-brown complexion, a small endearing nose, the kind of earnest good looks and full voice that won immediate trust. Jenny knew Uncle Dylan, an old college friend of her mother’s, even better than his spouse, the chaplain. Always there at her mother’s fundraisers, Dylan Chase somehow managed to know everyone very well. “As Teddy Roosevelt would have said, I am
dee
-lighted to welcome the class of 2112 to Frontera College, the first institution of higher learning on the high frontier. Let us give thanks for today’s fine weather and awe-inspiring sunset to our spacehab engineers, especially our chief engineer Quade Vincenzo.”

Applause erupted, with shouts and whistles from the owls. “Elephant Man, Elephant Man!” Jenny craned her neck, but Quade Vincenzo was not to be seen.

“Welcome to our pristine habitat,” the president continued, “a radical venture in the project of human civilization. Our very air is composed to a premodern standard—the same composition breathed by our Founding Fathers.” Before carbon emissions had risen off the chart.

Jenny took a deep breath. Frontera air did feel special, exceptionally pure and wholesome.

“Frontera is home to birds and deer, free of mosquitoes and yellow plague, untouched by drought or flood. Indeed, all Earth’s rivers could dry out, and all Earth’s oceans could swallow her shores, while our pristine habitat of Frontera would remain untouched.” His voice intensified. “But remember—no matter how perfect our habitat, it remains truly a frontier, the leading edge of humankind’s venture into space.”

In the sky above appeared a mile-high vision of Theodore Roosevelt, the old frontier president on his horse in the Sierras. “Teddy” was Uncle Dylan’s specialty—he could lecture for hours. Then Teddy’s image faded into that of Toynet founder Gil Wickett. The giant Gil Wickett grinned and waved like a child.

“If education,” continued President Chase, “is the highest calling of the human race, as we believe it is; and if Frontera College is the world’s finest liberal arts college, as we know it is; and if you, the entering class, are the most creative and best qualified class of students ever to enter Frontera, as indeed you are; then we can all look forward to a generation of the finest leaders in the academy, in commerce, in public life, and in the arts, that our nation has ever known.” The president raised his arms in a gesture encompassing the spacehab. “And where better to start than
alta frontera
? What better place for an undergraduate college? The Old English
frontera
meant ‘forehead’—the high frontier of the human body, facing the world with thought and reason.”

Dylan paused, his gaze sweeping the audience. “Frontera was built by the greatest minds of our day, stocked with the healthiest parts of a biosphere, settled by colonists of the highest purpose. College is where each of you will face the world’s frontiers with your own. Parents, you face good-byes to your sons and daughters. Students, you face the entire world with your own mental frontier—your own great ideals. Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground.” Pause for dramatic effect. “And if there is any one subject you fear the most, like the dire wolves our first Americans found by the Ohio River—take a course in that subject. Don’t stay in the pits—tear out and race your best. Take on your fears, and your dreams will become real. Face your frontiers at Frontera.”

Jenny shivered; the air had cooled quickly. This high frontier was different, she told herself, with its hundred-year plans and quality controls, its teddies and habitat engineers.

A shout behind her, and someone screamed. Startled, Jenny jumped and half turned; the stage area was lit, but beyond she could scarcely see. Her toybox filled with student text. Some animal let out a sound between a growl and a squeal. Then a black shape like a medium-sized dog clambered out, rearing on two legs before it trotted off among the trees.
“
Ursus americanus minimus
, black teddy bear.”

“Someone’s hurt.”

“His leg—it’s
bleeding
!”

The students fell back, stumbling into each other; two of them collapsed on the ground in a tangle of luminescent shoelaces. In Jenny’s toybox, her mother’s window opened. “Jenny, are you okay?
¿Seguro?
Jenny?”

Jenny steered around the fallen students, her foot slipping on a squashed peeper. She found the victim, a tall
chico
with football shoulders. The
chico
sat on the ground with a dazed “Whose toyworld am I in?” expression. His skin looked pale, not good. From her pocket she pulled a scanscope and snapped it around his arm. The data scrolled through her toybox. “What’s your name?”

Someone muttered, “Read his window,
tonta.
”

Respiration shallow, scalp circulation low-normal, pupil size normal. “It’s okay,” Jenny told him. “Take a breath. What’s your name?” The standard formula, she could ask any stranger.

“Charlie,” he said faintly. “Charlie Itoh.” Good, that matched his window.

“Lie down.” Jenny put a hand behind his neck to help him down. She looked up. “Towel or blanket? Anyone?”

A tall
chico
pulled off his own shirt and handed it to her. Jenny folded the shirt and placed it beneath Charlie’s head, as she helped him lie down. No airway obstruction, pupil size normal. His ankle, though, had a nasty gash. She plastered a wad of amyloid over it. “Charlie, tell me, who’s the president of the United States?” The next standard question. An elderly man with a stroke had once replied, “You are, Rosa.”

Charlie swallowed. “Bud Guzmán.”

Raucous sneers all round. Few here were fans of the president who’d canceled the Jupiter program, sent troops to Antarctica, and solarplated the Death Belt.

“Charlie, what happened?”

He grimaced. “Stuck my leg in a hole, and that critter came tearing out.”

“Does your ankle hurt?” She felt the ankle carefully, below the gash, which would do fine under amyloid. “Wiggle your toes.”

Charlie winced in pain.

From above, a medicraft whined as it descended. The students fell back as it landed and a small round DIRG emerged. No human operator?
Dios mío,
that was against EMS regulations.

Dean Kwon crouched down beside Jenny. “Charlie, help is here. You’ll be okay.”

In Jenny’s box, a window opened. It was Uncle Dylan. “Jenny, dear, how is he?”

“A sprain, I think, but he’ll be okay.”

“Calm, everyone.” From the podium the president’s voice was hypnotic, completely reassuring, like Governor Carrillo that time at her rally when a banner caught fire. “If we pursue a true frontier, as indeed we do—what’s a frontier without a few teddy bears?”

Nervous laughter rippled through the audience. Dean Kwon shook her head. “I told Quade to clear out that bear’s den.”